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Semantics First! Rethinking the Language Design Process (2011)
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| Venue: | In Int. Conf. on Software Language Engineering, LNCS 6940 |
| Citations: | 3 - 3 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Erwig11semanticsfirst!,
author = {Martin Erwig and Eric Walkingshaw},
title = {Semantics First! Rethinking the Language Design Process},
booktitle = {In Int. Conf. on Software Language Engineering, LNCS 6940},
year = {2011},
pages = {243--262}
}
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Abstract
Abstract The design of languages is still more of an art than an engineering discipline. Although recently tools have been put forward to support the language design process, such as language workbenches, these have mostly focused on a syntactic view of languages. While these tools are quite helpful for the development of parsers and editors, they provide little support for the underlying design of the languages. In this paper we illustrate how to support the design of languages by focusing on their semantics first. Specifically, we will show that powerful and general language operators can be employed to adapt and grow sophisticated languages out of simple semantics concepts. We use Haskell as a metalanguage and will associate generic language concepts, such as semantics domains, with Haskell-specific ones, such as data types. We do this in a way that clearly distinguishes our approach to language design from the traditional syntaxoriented one. This will reveal some unexpected correlations, such as viewing type classes as language multipliers. We illustrate the viability of our approach with several real-world examples. 1
Keyphrases
language design process semantics first language design semantics domain traditional syntaxoriented one general language operator little support haskell-specific one underlying design type class generic language concept several real-world example engineering discipline sophisticated language unexpected correlation language multiplier data type syntactic view simple semantics concept language workbench
